MochaHost Review – Cheap But Not Good

MochaHost, established in 2002, is a web hosting provider housed at San Jose, CA. Besides hosting services such as VPS hosting, shared hosting, dedicated hosting, WordPress hosting, Java JSP hosting, and so on, this company also launches some other services, like domain name registration, Internet marketing and website building.

In its initial years, this company gained much popularity because of their affordability. But in recent years, things have changed. This MochaHost review is based on customers’ feedbacks, analyzing their shared hosting packages, features, customer service and performance.

Price and Packages

MochaHost releases three shared hosting plans, called Soho, Business and Mocha at the regular prices of $3.95/mo, $4.9/mo and $10.35/mo. However, to attract more webmasters and maintain the longer relations with their old customers, this company offers some discounts, with which $1.95/mo, $2.45/mo and $6.21/mo are available for the three plans. It is quite affordable, right? But don’t celebrate too soon – you need to know that these discounted prices are available for orders lasting for three years or more.

Another notable thing is that MochaHost has an attractive 180 days money back guarantee. Again, do not be fooled by the words. In fact, MochaHost offers two options, including 180 days pro-rated refund and 30 days full refund. Customers can only choose one policy to reduce the risk of losing money. Besides, the refund guarantee does not cover the fees of domain registration, ID protection, additional static IPs and additional site builder licenses. PayPal and major credit cards, such as Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover, are allowed for purchasing.

Features

The plans of MochaHost include different features. For instance, the primary Soho plan comes with only one website, normal server power and Mocha load protection while the second plan offers unlimited websites and super server power which can deliver faster speed.

1 lifetime free domain and a website builder are involved only in the last two packages. You should know the free domain is only available in the yearly terms The last Mocha plan also offers a free static IP address, 2 GB dedicated memory and PCI scanning.

In addition, the three plans come with unlimited disk space, monthly data transfer and shared SSL. cPanel is also offered in all plans to provide an easy way for account management.

The primary Soho plan is cheap indeed, but judging from its features, it is valueless. Building any online store is not allowed; no website builder is included, and website apps are not supported. What’s more, development features like Perl, Python and Ruby are only available in the other two plans.

Performance

MochaHost claims to offer 100% network uptime, which is obviously hard to be realized because more or less, downtime is unavoidable sometimes for hosting. The statistics from Google indicate quite a few downtime happened in the past years, and some of them even continued for days.

Located in the Chicago, IL, the data centers of MochaHost cover 485,000 squares feet. With the support of UPS powered by 32 rotary power system, backup power generators and fuel tanks, this company hopes to offer a friendly hosting environment. Besides, powered by 96-192GB of RAM, Dual 4-6 Core Hyper-Threading Intel Xeon CPUs and RAID 10 configuration, their servers are hoped to be fast and secure.

However, we find that MochaHost is unstable and slow after hosting websites on it for over three months. The average response time of its servers is beyond 590ms. Many customers on the internet reflect that they encounter frequent downtimes that last for several hours, which is attributed to some unknown network problems, outages and website maintenance. Probably, to maximize profits, the company has its servers overloaded. In a word, MochaHost is not a reliable hosting provider.

Customer Service

The technical support of MochaHost is not as professional as some other top-rated shared hosting providers who offer online chat, phone call and email support, because the contacting methods of this company are furnishings. If you ask for a help by email, you might wait for a week to get their response. You can not call directly to their staffs and there is no call back. Luckily, in their support center, you can find some functional tutorials and articles.

According to their customers, there is a lot room for the support staffs of this company to improve their quality and attitude. Sometimes when you need help, the technicians and engineers do not have any clue or just give some misleading information, which is irresponsible. You can even search the reviews about this company on Google to see how bad their technical support is.

Conclusion

The comprehensive review above objectively illustrates the advantages and disadvantages of MochaHost. We can make a summary that this web host is not recommendable because although they have cheap prices, their features are limited and technical support is terrible. So you have to think twice before the decision in prevention of being trapped.

Instead, here are some good alternatives for shared hosting who are trusted by thousands of webmasters for their worry-free technical support and fast speed.

I've been an experienced web developer, SEOer and technical writer since 2003. I worked in many international high-tech companies including Microsoft and Autodesk before 2012. Now I own a startup company in San Francisco, CA, focusing on developing websites and blogs to deliver exceptional results to global readers by leveraging the power of Internet.
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